The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it's no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let's all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it'll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement... right?
I once took my bike to the Burger King drive-thru. It was late at night, no cars in sight. Yet the next time I went there, about two weeks later, they had already put up a sign explicitly banning bicycles.
I found that on European platforms, you can speak anonymously and A LOT more candidly about topics censored on American ones, e.g. SH, nearly all "adult" topics covered in great detail, and what have you.
My landlord would have a very hard time kicking me out for almost any reason, even if I turned the entire apartment into a swamp.
In fact, the only item from OP's list that rings true to me is the boss one. They will always find a way of getting back to you, legal or not.
Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?Same thing you described happened to me so many times I've lost count. Furthermore, I've compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn't you know, what you see in your "profile preview" or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We've seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles "in case we get interrupted." When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.And that's not even mentioning the bots and "controllers," as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.
That surely would have made for a different vibe...